It is an emotional event when a serious book collector takes a well bound
book of classic content into his or her hands; it is the same as that
experienced by a seasoned admirer of art. To make this book yours becomes
your immediate object. With the achievement of the object will come a pride
of possession and a spiritual homage.

"He did not conceal a collector's just pride of possession;
but you need only see him take a book from its shield to know that he felt
himself the ephemeral custodian of a perennial treasure. There is a right
way and a wrong way of taking a book from the shelf. To put a finger on
the top, is a vulgar error which has broken many backs. This was never his
way: he would gently push back each of the adjacent books, and so pull out
the desired volume with a persuasive finger and thumb. Then, before
opening the pages, he applied his silk handkerchief to the gilded top, lest
dust should find its way between the leaves. These were the visible signs
of a spiritual homage." (Chapman, Selected Modern
English Essays (Oxford University Press, 1927) at p. 376.)

It is, of course, not the momentary look and feel of a book which sustains
a person's love for it; but, rather, its contents. A proper selection of
books will yield a ready and useful source of knowledge which will assist
in the daily bouts with life: books will become your allies, your friends,
to whom you may turn for assistance and solace.

"I have friends, whose society is extremely agreeable to me;
they are of all ages, and of every country. They have distinguished
themselves both in the cabinet and in the field, and obtained high honors
for their knowledge of the sciences. It is easy to gain access to them,
for they are always at my service, and I admit them to my company, and
dismiss them from it, whenever I please. They are never troublesome, but
immediately answer every question I ask them. Some relate to me the events
of the past ages, while others reveal to me the secrets of nature. Some
teach me how to live, and other how to die. Some, by their vivacity, drive
away my cares and exhilarate my spirits, while others give fortitude to my
mind, and teach me the important lesson how to restrain my desires, and to
depend wholly on myself. They open to me, in short, the various avenues of
all the arts and sciences, and upon their information I safely rely in all
emergencies. 'In my study,' quaintly said Sir William Waller, 'I am sure to
converse with none but wise men; but abroad it is impossible for me to avoid
the fools.'" Allibone's dictionary'" (Charles
Richardson (1775-1865) The Choice of Books (New York: Alden,
1883) at pp. 23-4.)

"Even a millionaire will ease his toils, lengthen his life, and
add 100 per cent. to his daily pleasures, if he becomes a bibliophile;
while to the man of business with a taste for books, who through the day
has struggled in the battle of life, with all its irritating rebuffs and
anxieties, what a blessed season of pleasurable repose opens upon him as he
enters his sanctum, where every article wafts him a welcome and every book
is a personal friend." [Birrell
(1850-1933), from "Bookworms," Selected Essays.]

"... There is no other method of fixing those thoughts which
arise and disappear in the mind of man, and transmitting them to the last
periods of time; no other method of giving a permanency to our ideas, and
preserving the knowledge of any particular person, when his body is mixed
with the common mass of matter, and his soul retired into the world of
spirits. Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind,
which are delivered down from generation to generation, as presents to the
posterity of those who are yet unborn." (As attributed to
Addison by Richardson, op. cit., p. 198.]

The best books are sprinkled in the same number over a given span of time:
the longer the span, the longer the list. Thus, while a list of the best
books will contain ones written from all ages, the majority, naturally
enough, will come from that long span of time which precedes the current
age. One definition of a classic book is that it is one that has survived
the age in which it was written; that its words of advice and direction are
applicable to all ages; it is a book that has surfaced from an older age to a
newer age, kept afloat, so to speak, by the readers of all ages. It follows,
then, that no book written in the current age can bear the badge, classic;
it must wait until a new age has arrived when likely its author has long
been dead. Certainly, however, one will be able to spot, within the current
age, leading candidates or contenders.

"A thousand snares beset the path to immortality ...; there are
a hundred ways to the pit of oblivion. Therefore, when a writer has by
general consent escaped his age, when he has survived his environment, it
is madness and folly for us, the children of a brief hour, to despise the
great literary tradition which has put him where he is." (Birrell,
op. cit. at p. 300.)

"The study of the classics ... teaches us to believe that there
is something really great and excellent in the world, surviving all the
shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion, and raises us above that
low and servile fear which bows only to present power and upstart authority
... we feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human
thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations
and ages.
It is hard to find in minds otherwise formed [viz., people who have not
read the classics], either a real love of excellence, or a belief that
any excellence exists superior to their own."
(Hazlitt,
Round Table.)

An art which must be acquired if one is to advance himself or herself, no
matter the area of pursuit, is to make a list of the best reading material
on the subject. Knowing how to read is fundamental, but knowing what to
read is just as essential. "Education has produced a vast population able
to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."
(
Trevelyan.) No matter the subject, then, the first
question, always is -- What shall I read?

Read "no mean books," said
Emerson who then proceeded to
lay down three rules:

1. Never read any book that is not a year old.
2. Never read any but famed books.
3. Never read any but what you like.

In short, every book that we take up without a purpose is an opportunity
lost of taking up a book with a purpose. One should not be a desultory
reader; one should be a purposeful and organized reader. The world is much
too full of books: "trivial, enervating, inane, and, even noxious."

"It is the case with literature as with life; wherever we turn
we come upon the incorrigible mob of humankind, whose name is Legion,
swarming everywhere, damaging everything, as flies in summer. Hence the
multiplicity of bad books, those exuberant weeds of literature which choke
the true corn. Such books rob the public of time, money, and attention,
which ought properly to belong to good literature and noble aims, and they
are written with a view merely to make money or occupation. They are
therefore not merely useless, but injurious. Nine-tenths of our current
literature has no other end but to inveigle a thaler or two out of the
public pocket, for which purpose author, publisher and printer are leagued
together. A more pernicious, subtler, and bolder piece of trickery is that
by which penny-a-liners and scribblers succeed in destroying good taste and
real culture. ... Hence, the paramount importance of acquiring the art not
to read; in other words, of not reading such books as occupy the public
mind, or even those which made a noise in the world, and reach several
editions in their first and last years of existence. We should recollect
that he who writes for fools finds an enormous audience, and we should
devote the ever scant leisure of our circumscribed existence to the master
spirits of all ages and nations, those who tower over humanity, and whom
the voice of Fame proclaims: only such writers cultivate and instruct us.
Of bad books we can never read too little; of the good never too much.
The bad are intellectual poison and undermine the understanding. Because
people insist on reading not the best books written for all time, but the
newest contemporary literature, writers of the day remain in the narrow
circle of the same perpetually revolving ideas, and the age continues to
wallow in its own mire. ... Mere acquired knowledge belongs to us only like
a wooden leg and wax nose. Knowledge attained by means of thinking
resembles our natural limbs, and is the only kind that really belongs to
us. Hence the difference between the thinker and the pedant. The
intellectual possession of the independent thinker is like a beautiful
picture which stands before us, a living thing with fitting light and
shadow, sustained tones, perfect harmony of color. That of the merely
learned man may be compared to a palette covered with bright colors,
perhaps even arranged with some system, but wanting in harmony, coherence
and meaning. ... Only those writers profit us whose understanding is
quicker, more lucid than our own, by whose brain we indeed think for a
time, who quicken our thoughts, and lead us whither alone we could not
find our way." (Richardson, op. cit., pp. 63-5.)

Birrell in another of his essays, "Is It Possible to Tell a Good Book from
a Bad One?" writes as Richardson wrote, the output of books is extraordinary
and their numbers destroy their reputation.

"But not only is the outpoint enormous, and what may be called
the undergrowth rank, but the treatment is too frequently crude. Penmen,
as bookwriters are now pleasingly called, in their great haste to carry
their goods early to market, are too apt to gobble up what they take to be
the results of scientific investigation; and stripping them bare of the
conditions and qualifications properly belonging to scientific methods, to
present them to the world as staple truths, fit matter for aesthetic
treatment. There is something half comic, half tragic in the almost
headlong apprehension of half-born truths by half-educated minds. Whilst
the serious investigator is carefully "sounding his dim and perilous way,"
making good his ground as he goes, "'Till captive Science yields her
last retreat'," these half-inspired dabblers, these ready-reckoners, are
already hawking the discovery about the streets, making it the motif
of their jejune stage-plays and the text of their blatant discourses."
(Birrell, op. cit. at p. 291.)

The choice of books would be greatly aided if the reader, in taking up a
volume, would always ask himself just why he is going to read it, and of
what service it is to be to him. It should always be borne in mind that
the busiest reader must leave unread all but a mere fraction of the good
books in the world. I quote, once again:

"Only a creature possessed of Macaulay's reading power and the
leisure of St. Simeon Stylites could keep his head above the stream of
contemporary literature. Yet even he could be in miserable case. There
is 'our magnificent heritage' to be dealt with - the accumulation of
classical English literature. And, vista behind vista, one sees the
literature of other European nations, stretching back to the Greek and
Roman classics and frowned over by those august nightmares, the Sacred
Books of the East.
What is to be done about It? Even if we allow no time for frivolities and
read only those works which 'you really must read,' it has now become
impossible for the longest-lived, the most methodical and resolute mortal
to get through the excellent literature which stares at him from the
shelves with mute entreaty and reproach." ["Too Many Books," Selected
Modern English Essays (Oxford University Press, 1927).]

For the important question of what to read, one may profitably turn to
lists which have already been prepared, provided that such a list has been
prepared by a respected authority. For example, for the lawyer, who finds
his free time to be at a premium, one might look to the article written by
the American legal scholar, John H. Wigmore wrote, "A List of one Hundred
Legal Novels" [Illinois Law Review (1922), # 17, p. 26] to
be of immeasurable help. Wigmore prepared the list with lawyers in mind,
his thinking being that lawyers could learn much from the great novel
writers of the past. Wigmore broke his list down into four categories:

(A) Novels in which some trial scene is described - perhaps including a
skilful cross-examination;
(B) Novels in which the typical traits of a lawyer or judge, or the ways
of professional life, are portrayed;
(C) Novels in which the methods of law in the prosecution and punishment
of crime are delineated; and
(D) Novels in which some point of law, affecting the rights or the conduct
of the personages, enters into the plot.

Though elsewhere I have set forth
Wigmore's list let me give
an example from each of his categories, as follows:

I might venture to say that a lawyer who has not read at least some of the
novels on Wigmore's list is probably going to have a more difficult time
trying to size up people, and sizing up people is one of the principle
tasks of a practising lawyer.